Genesis 28:10-19
Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

From dreams to parables, the story is the same: God wants to get through to you and will use every opportunity, every crisis and every life story. In the scriptures assigned for today we find the story of Jacob’s spiritual emergency and Jesus effort to set the stage for the spiritual emergence of the disciples. In each story we find preparation for dramatic understanding of spiritual truth preceded by danger, dream work and desperation.

In Genesis 28 we read Jacob’s story. Jacob is in crisis. He has stolen his brother’s birthright and is on the run. Perhaps he wonders if it was worth it to get his father’s blessing and become the one whom God would use to bring about the promises of national inheritance. So Jacob stops for the night and anxiously prepares for sleep. He takes a stone for his pillow as he lays on the ground staring off into the stars wondering if God will punish him and his brother will kill him. Soon he dreams and there before him is a stairway to heaven connecting earth and heaven with messenger angels going up and down. He gets the message as he envisions God at the top of the ladder who pronounces the reality of his blessing. “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendents the land on which you are now lying. Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the West and to the East, to the North and to the South. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”

So what does this mean? To Jacob it is both surprise and affirmation. God is not going to get him for his cunning, dishonest effort at getting his father’s blessing. Instead, God is going to keep his promise to Abraham and to Isaac with a reaffirmation to the next of kin, Isaac that his blessing is both real and God will watch over him and bring him back to this land to fulfill the promises of his people. Wow! This is indeed a much different God than Jacob had thought. Here is a God of love and forgiveness – a God whose see level is much different from the human. This is a dramatic spiritual transformation and affirmation! Jacob was filled with fear and is now filled with awe. Sometimes, God surprises us when we least expect it. We find God’s blessing when we think we least deserve it.

So we turn to Matthew 13 which is that loaded chapter of parables taught by Jesus from a boat near the shore of Lake Galilee. The first is the parable of the sower from which we learn about the word of God being planted in a variety of soils. Like dreams, we always find ourselves as a central character in the story. We ask what kind of soil are we? How able are we to nurture the development of the word within us.

The second story is today’s parable about the seed and the weed. Here we recognize the presence of evil among us and how we are to deal with it. Evil has always been active in the world and today is no exception. There seems to be two means of dealing with that evil. There are those who believe it is their moral duty to rid the earth of whatever evil they perceive. So our first lesson is that God sees things differently than we do. It is possible that in God’s good time, good will triumph over evil. We are to maintain a non-anxious presence and wait for God’s activity. We are too eager to battle with evil as we see it. The danger is that evil is amazingly deceptive and only God can really recognize it for what it is. So we wait on God!

Then follows the parable of the mustard seed and of the parable of the yeast. In each parable we recognize that Jesus is expecting us to have a steep learning curve. Seeds of faith are often preceded by seeds of anxiety and despair. Our faith is constantly informed by the Spirit of God. God uses every opportunity to grow that faith given to us for our spiritual competence.

Please remember that the disciples were getting very anxious about a growing movement of the government and the religious leaders to put an end to the message of this rebel Jesus. The only thing stopping them is his tremendous popularity among the people. Like Jacob, they need a spiritual intervention that gives them hope in the face of fear. This will be even more critical after Jesus is crucified and all hope seems crushed. We call the intervention a spiritual emergence on our part which is often preceded by a spiritual emergency as our fears reach an all time high.

Dr. Stanislav Grof, a renowned psychiatrist, has spent years researching this phenomena. He came to this country to become Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore and went on to become Chief of Psychiatric Research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. It was Dr. Grof who first defined Spiritual emergence as "the movement of an individual to a more expanded way of being that involves enhanced emotional and psychosomatic health, greater freedom of personal choices, and a sense of deeper connection with other people, nature, and the cosmos. An important part of this development is an increasing awareness of the spiritual dimension in one's life and in the universal scheme of things." He informs us that when spiritual emergence is very rapid and dramatic this natural process can become a crisis, and spiritual emergence becomes a spiritual emergency.

You and I need to pay attention to each situation that appears to be a crisis in our lives and the lives of others for it may well be the opportunity for God’s direct intervention as it was for Jacob. In Chinese the two characters for crisis are "wei" and "ji" meaning danger and the opportunity for critical change to begin. It is both fearful and hopeful.

Way back in the first chapter of the Bible we find Adam and Eve in crisis. They were seduced into thinking that their decisions were more important than God’s. The result was the crisis of homelessness. They became exiled from God’s home where it was natural to choose good over evil. So the history of the Israelites shows again and again that when the nation was in crisis it was because the people had neglected to put God first in their lives. They had a crisis of identity. They saw themselves as separated from God which is always a possible with free will.

So 2,000 years ago, after much groundwork had been done, God stepped down. God became man and something started to happen as man met God in flesh. A new Adam had come. Man started to see what he was meant to be. "Thus it is written, ‘The first Adam became a living being,’ the last Adam became a life giving spirit" (1 Corinthians 15:45). The identity crisis had been solved. We were now able to allow that life giving spirit to rule our lives but it would probably take a series of spiritual emergencies for us to emerge spiritually.

A Hindu holy man of the nineteenth century, Ramakrishna, tells a fable that we can utilize in our thinking at this point. There was a motherless tiger cub who was adopted by goats and brought up to speak their language, emulate their ways, eat their food. In fact, the little tiger cub believed he was a goat. However, there came a day when a king tiger happened along and all the goats fled in terror. But the little cub lingered behind, afraid and yet somehow unafraid. The cub bleated a bit and then nervously nibbled at the grass. The king tiger laughed and asked the small tiger what he meant by this masquerade. He said nothing, only bleating once again. So the king tiger took him to a pool of still water and forced him to look down at the two reflections side by side. But the little one failed to see any significance to it. When this failed, the king tiger hunted down a young deer and brought some of the raw meat to the young tiger. At first the cub recoiled from the strange taste. But he kept licking and soon sunk his teeth deep into the raw flesh. His tail began to swing and his claws began to dig into the soft earth. A roar began to swell deep in his throat. He glanced over at the king tiger and he began to realize he was indeed a cool cat.

John Newton was the captain of a ship carrying captured men and women from Africa to become slaves in America during the mid-eighteenth century. He gave little thought to the enormous suffering experienced by his human cargo as they were torn from home and families and herded below decks of his ship. He gave little thought to the magnitude of the sin against God and humanity in which he was a willing participant. Until that day. As he watched his captive passengers share their meager food supplies and comfort one another, and as he heard them sing songs of their homeland, Newton's very soul was in distress. Overcome by guilt, Newton suddenly saw himself with new eyes. He realized that it was he and not his human cargo that was in bondage. It was he, not those in chains below deck, who could not free himself from the chains of slavery. He knew that he was doomed. Only by God's grace in Jesus Christ could he find forgiveness.

Of course, Newton did not "find" Christ. It was Christ who found him. It was the crucified and risen Christ who broke his chains of bondage to sin. It was the Spirit of Christ who brought Newton to his knees. It was the Spirit of Christ who led him to stop carrying human cargo and to speak out against the sin of human slavery. And it was the spirit of Christ who led Newton to respond by writing the words to a hymn that touches all of us, "Amazing Grace." Newton's words resound in our hearts: "I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see." John Newton, touched by the spirit of God, began to see himself and the world with new eyes.

A recent survey of Presbyterian baby boomers indicated that there was little difference in the beliefs of persons in the two largest categories: "moderately active in any congregation" (29%), and "uninvolved, but religious" (21%). That's one half of those Presbyterians born after 1946. There's little evidence to indicate that these findings are much different in other large Protestant denominations. In this nation we are also seeing the arrival of traditional religions to which we used to send missionaries overseas. For example, the number of Muslims in the United States is nearly equal to the number of Episcopalians. Currently, there are as many mosques in our country as there are congregations in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. These are indeed challenging times in which we live. As in the era of Isaiah, we are at a significant turning point in the church. And the real crisis in the church is spiritual, not organizational; biblical, not financial, theological, not numerical. The real crisis is a crisis of identity. Who are we? Whose are we? What is God calling us to do about it?

May we recognize God in each opportunity for spiritual growth as we are transformed from one identity to another.

Genesis 28:10-19

Jacob's Dream at Bethel
10 Jacob left Beersheba and set out for Haran. 11 When he reached a certain place, he stopped for the night because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones there, he put it under his head and lay down to sleep. 12 He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. 13 There above it stood the LORD, and he said: "I am the LORD, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac. I will give you and your descendants the land on which you are lying. 14 Your descendants will be like the dust of the earth, and you will spread out to the west and to the east, to the north and to the south. All peoples on earth will be blessed through you and your offspring. 15 I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go, and I will bring you back to this land. I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you."
16 When Jacob awoke from his sleep, he thought, "Surely the LORD is in this place, and I was not aware of it." 17 He was afraid and said, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven."
18 Early the next morning Jacob took the stone he had placed under his head and set it up as a pillar and poured oil on top of it. 19 He called that place Bethel, though the city used to be called Luz.

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

The Parable of the Weeds
24Jesus told them another parable: "The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. 25But while everyone was sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away. 26When the wheat sprouted and formed heads, then the weeds also appeared.
27"The owner's servants came to him and said, 'Sir, didn't you sow good seed in your field? Where then did the weeds come from?'
28" 'An enemy did this,' he replied.
"The servants asked him, 'Do you want us to go and pull them up?'
29" 'No,' he answered, 'because while you are pulling the weeds, you may root up the wheat with them. 30Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the harvesters: First collect the weeds and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat and bring it into my barn.' "

The Parable of the Weeds Explained
36Then he left the crowd and went into the house. His disciples came to him and said, "Explain to us the parable of the weeds in the field."
37He answered, "The one who sowed the good seed is the Son of Man. 38The field is the world, and the good seed stands for the sons of the kingdom. The weeds are the sons of the evil one, 39and the enemy who sows them is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age, and the harvesters are angels.
40"As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. 41The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. 42They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.